


whetstone

by noiselesspatientspider (shipyrds)



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Tragedy, Crimson Flower Route, F/F, Post-Canon, i really cannot stress enough how much this is not a happy fic, murdering your beloved for your shared ideals? That's Romance Baybey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-08
Updated: 2019-10-08
Packaged: 2020-11-27 15:44:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20950880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shipyrds/pseuds/noiselesspatientspider
Summary: She’s always been a weapon. She just didn’t realize– when you’re a sword, you can be pointed in directions you didn’t intend. At the Empress’s heart, for instance.





	whetstone

After the war, they go to Enbarr, where Edelgard works to quell her fractious nobles and Byleth works to learn the intricate rituals of an empire she finds utterly perplexing. She feels like Petra must have, thrust into a world she was not built for but must survive in all the same. 

They are married, of course, in a ceremony of such pomp Edelgard threatens to elope. "I just want to have one thing that's ours," she confesses late one night, as Byleth helps her take her hair down. 

"I know," Byleth says, rubbing her knuckles at the base of Edelgard's neck, where the weight of the crown has created intractable knots of muscle. Edelgard has always carried too much. 

"Maybe after the ceremony," Edelgard says. "I'll give the guards the evening off. We can go to the gardens."

"Hubert won't like it," Byleth says, knowing as soon as the words leave her mouth that it's a mistake. 

Edelgard whirls around to face her. "I don't care," she says, "what Hubert thinks of my wedding night."

Byleth kisses her, rather than say that Hubert would be right to hate the idea of Edelgard unprotected in the mazelike palace gardens, with their many secret vantage points. Besides, they both know that after the wedding Edelgard is going to have to receive every single noble in Fódlan with Byleth on her arm. 

It's a nice fantasy, though. 

\--

The wedding is predictably hideous. Edelgard excised the church portion of the ceremony, but there's still a hundred-odd rituals they have to observe for appearances. At least the morning bath had been nice– a chance to be alone, just the two of them, and also Hubert, who’d been filling in for the traditional archbishop’s role. He’d cracked a joke about how Ferdinand had thought he bathed Edelgard every night, and Edelgard had shot her arm out and pulled him, sputtering, into the massive font. 

And it is good to see everyone again; Petra is here, leading a delegation of very serious-faced Brigards, her hair in the most elaborate braids Byleth has ever seen. She and Bernadetta will shoot the triumphal flaming arrows later in the evening. Lindhart is asleep on Caspar’s shoulder. 

Ferdinand has been near tears since he and Dorothea put the wedding crowns on their heads, and Byleth spots him full-on sobbing as Hubert wraps the marriage cloth around their joined hands. Edelgard’s palm is a little sweaty in hers, her brow furrowed in concentration, and Byleth squeezes her hand and flashes a smile at her.

“I’m glad it’s you,” Edelgard murmurs, as Hubert drones on about their duties to each other and to their shared future. Her cheeks pink a little. “I’ll show you how glad later.” 

Byleth supresses a laugh and blushes, knowing as she does that this blush is going to make it onto a hundred different commemorative cards. But none of the people who buy memorial teapots with her face on them will know why she’s blushing, and she’s fiercely glad.

\--

Byleth continues to be surprised by how many people seem to want to talk to her. She'd expected, now that the fighting was done, to feel a little at loose ends. After all, at the heart of things, her talents are mostly limited to swinging large pieces of metal at problems until they go away.

But minor ministers keep harassing her secretary to schedule “chats.” Ferdinand and Hubert had insisted on a secretary, and Byleth, though loathe to admit it, is realizing they were right. She gets too much mail to screen for stray Sagittaes herself.

When they make their first official appearance to a (carefully vetted) crowd of cheering civilians, there are just as many cries of her name as Edelgard's. The former bishop of Enbarr asks her to assist with creating a secular version of the Society of Saints Indech and Macuil, at which she stares blankly until they relent. 

"The people have really taken to you," Edelgard says late one night. They're both busy enough that the nights are the only time they have, and Byleth loves getting to see Edelgard like this, the empress without her trappings. 

Byleth hums noncommittally. At the former Feast of Saint Cichol, now renamed the Argile Day, a father had asked her to bless his child. She'd taken the baby, unsure of what to do, how to respond, and patted its head. She thinks that might have been a mistake; after she'd handed the baby back the father had tried to kiss her ring. 

"I'm glad," Edelgard says. "I was worried you'd be bored here, without any battles to fight. I'd found something for everyone else, even Linhardt, but I didn't know what you'd want to do."

"Just this is fine," Byleth says, reaching up to tuck a strand of Edelgard’s hair behind her ear. She doesn't know what she wants to do either. 

Edelgard sighs against her chest and pulls her closer. “Let me know,” she says. “Whatever you want.”

“I’ll make myself useful,” Byleth says. “Don’t worry about me.”  
\--

After a truly endless day of listening to citizen disputes over everything from livestock to a particularly brutal kidnapping, Hubert finds Byleth beating a dummy into powder with a training sword. 

"You're unhappy, aren't you?" he says, after the canvas has split, sending sawdust everywhere, and Byleth has dissolved into a coughing fit. 

She pours some water into her cupped hands and splashes it on her face. "Yes," she says. The "desperately" is implied. 

"We worried about this," Hubert says, and Byleth finds herself oddly touched that she'd been included in his contingency plans. 

"I'm trying," she says. "I'm keeping busy." 

"You're a sword rusting in a glass case," Hubert says, "and you're going to drive yourself mad."

"I'm the royal consort of Adrestia-cum-Faerghus," she says. "I think madness comes with the territory."

Hubert laughs the sharp cackle she'd always liked. "Let's try to break with the past, shall we?" he says, and extends a hand. "How do you feel about intrigue?" 

\--

As it turns out, Byleth feels much the same about intrigue as she had about mediation, which is to say, generally useless. Hubert's job seems to be mostly combing through reams of tax records looking for discrepancies, but every line looks the same to Byleth, whose education had not included property valuation. 

"When you promised me intrigue," she says, "I expected a bit more poisoning and a bit less paperwork."

Hubert doesn't look up from _Burghe’s Minor Peerage._ "My dear Byleth," he says, "the paperwork is so I know who to poison."

She sighs, and he looks up, his hair falling back over one eye. He always brushes it out of the way when he reads, which both she and Edelgard find endearing, in part because she suspects no one else sees it.

“I am sorry,” he says. “I’m still rebuilding networks, you know, and a number of the people I once thought trustworthy are either probably traitors, definitely traitors or dead.”

“You should talk to Ferdinand,” she says. “And maybe you should send me back out to reduce that probable traitor list.”

\--

It’s fine. (It’s miserable, but at least she’s not squinting at registries.) It’s the middle of the rainy season in Enbarr, which means the yearly floods have arrived, which means that Byleth spends half her time on a sodden horse and half the time up to her knees in muck. She hauls sandbags and rebuilds dykes and learns to row, paddling around a flooded village two days away from Bergliez, looking for survivors. 

The people are almost pathetically grateful for any aid at all. She supposes the past few generations of emperors haven’t done much for the popular perception of the role, and resolves to talk to Edelgard. A Wyvern Moon this wet means a shorter growing season means a meager harvest means a long, miserable winter, high bread prices, unrest in the capital. Are there storehouses? What if the barley there has already sprouted in the damp? 

She has to wade through a church flooded waist-high to lift a sobbing child off an altar, the highest point in the building. When she picks the poor kid up, she turns to find her entire company staring at her. “What,” she says, too tired for this. “Do I have mud on my face or something.” 

“No,” Caspar says, tromping up behind the frozen soldiers. “Move, everyone! What’s wrong with you? There’s a whole village to clear!” 

When Byleth slogs back into the castle, she’s too tired to bring up much of anything. The damp seems to have soaked into her bones. She drops her boots and her clothes in a wet pile next to the bed and barely stirs when Edelgard slips under the blankets and presses a kiss to her forehead. 

“I missed you,” Edelgard says in the darkness. Byleth’s eyes are too heavy to reply.  
\--

When Byleth wakes, the bed is empty, the sun is streaming in. There’s a tray next to her bed with breakfast, a steaming teapot, a forest of small tins, and a note. 

_ My dear Byleth:_

_Somehow after all these years I’ve never learned what your favorite tea was. I hope you will forgive me. In the meantime, here’s a Ferdinand-approved selection, and you can rectify my mistake at dinner tonight. _

_Sunrise has nothing on you, my love. I wish I had been there to see you wake. _

_Yours, El _

Byleth rubs at her bedhead, which still smells faintly of floodwater, a foolish grin on her face. She’s going to have to try all of the teas, she thinks. Preference has always been a luxury she’s never had the time to develop. 

She likes the Dagda fruit best, she thinks. It smells weird and a little offputting and tastes bitter, and then swoopingly sweet. She sits in bed and sips her expensive tea and gets crumbs all over the sheets and feels like a real noble for all of five minutes, until she remembers she’ll have to go clean the muck off her boots.

\--

They have a problem, Hubert explains, when he calls Byleth to his office, ostensibly to help him with faculty at Enbarr’s academy. And the problem is that in the absence of the saints, the people are going to make a martyr. 

“It will not be you, necessarily,” he hastens to add. “My security is too good for that. But somewhere in the Empire, or Faerghus, or maybe Duscur, a peasant will have a vision or a child will suddenly recover or a village will be spared from plague. And they will remember Dimitri as a golden-haired warrior instead of a bloodthirsty monster, or Marianne’s hands spread in healing. They will decide it’s safer to believe in someone they hardly knew but who is safely dead than someone they also hardly know who is alive and has the power to wipe them off the map.”

“And the Church will come back,” Byleth says. 

“Well, it’s less the Church that I worry about, and more the cover that structure would give our enemies and the way it would delegitimize Her Majesty,” Hubert says, folding his gloved hands. “But yes.”

Byleth looks down at his cluttered desk. 

“I can find someone else,” Hubert says. “I am very, very clever.” 

Byleth snorts.

His face grows serious. “But I cannot guarantee that it will make the problem go away,” he says. “Religious fervor is hard to fake, and your story has the undeniable advantage of being true. If we can get out ahead of this, you and Edelgard could be a true double-headed eagle for the first time in a thousand years, king and God in one mighty fist.” He looks at the soot-stained banner above his fireplace. 

“You know I am not a believer,” Hubert adds, quietly. “But I would follow that kind of power to the ends of the earth. Anyone would.”

And Edelgard? Byleth wants to ask, but the words stick in her throat. Does she know that you want to make her– make us– into yet another twisted creature? 

“Think it over,” he says. “That is all I ask.”

Hubert never tells her to do anything. He is technically her subordinate; he only asks. But his requests are rarely something she wants to refuse.

\--

“The stories are spreading south,” Hubert says. “The people do not bother with sainthood. They’ve started calling her the Vessel of the Divine.”

“What’s our plan?” Edelgard asks, eyes sharp. “We have to nip this in the bud.”

Byleth flexes her sword hand in her lap. It feels too light. She’s not sure why she’s here, at this table, in this room, listening to Edelgard and Hubert discuss her budding cult, and not out doing– anything else. Putting a stop to the cult, maybe. Proving she’s no saint. 

“Do we?” Hubert asks. He cocks his head. “We abolished the church, but the people’s faith does not disappear just because we drove it underground. We need to give them something to believe in that is not a literal monster.”

“We did,” Edelgard says. “Themselves. I won’t be another figurehead, Hubert.”

Hubert sighs. “I would not ask that of you. I am asking it of Byleth.”

“Byleth?” Edelgard’s voice is cautious. 

Byleth didn’t realize her feet had carried her until she was standing halfway across the room at one of the windows. “I’m not-- I won’t pretend to be something I’m not.” 

She thinks of the way the child she’d carried from the altar in flooded Nundae had looked at her. The way the child’s mothers and father had wept into each other’s arms, thanking the goddess for the safe delivery of their little one. The way they’d frozen at Byleth’s footstep at the door, the imperial eagle on her armor, until Byleth had spread her hands in greeting.

Her hands clench. “Find another saint. I’m ill-suited to the job.”

\--

Dorothea’s room is as warm and inviting as the imperial bedroom is imposing, despite Byleth’s attempts to make it feel more like a home. Dorothea's draped the walls with furs and scarves; a censer hangs in one corner, burning something spicy-sweet. Dorothea arranges her on a pillow and pours them both tea, then adds a healthy splash of alcohol with a wink. 

“It’s poitín,” she says, at Byleth’s raised eyebrow. “Petra gave it to me, and you don’t get to look at me like that; you’re not my teacher anymore. You need a break.”

“From what,” Byleth says. “I don’t do anything.” But she picks up the steaming cup and takes a sip, enjoying the burn.

Dorothea levels a glare at her. “You’ve single-handedly restarted the Imperial Mage School without the church trappings. You averted a famine, and I hear you’ve taken on some of Hubert’s workload too.”

Byleth looks down at the blood she hasn’t quite gotten out from under her fingernails as Dorothea adds, “Neither Ferdinand or Hubert know what to do with you.”

“Well, that makes three of us,” Byleth jokes. 

“I’m worried about you,” Dorothea says, and when Byleth looks up, her eyes are sharp and concerned.

Byleth takes another sip of tea. It’s too hot to knock back the way she’d like. “Don’t be,” she says.

Dorothea frowns. “You know we all care about you, don’t you? It’s not just Edie, although she’d go mad before she’d hurt you.” She takes Byleth’s hands. “I won’t push anymore, but all of us– everyone wants to see you happy. Whatever we can do.”

Byleth gives her hands a squeeze and slips her own free. “I know,” she says. “I know you do. Now tell me about the latest opera disaster so I can stop thinking about wheat tariffs.” 

Dorothea obliges, though her smile says Byleth isn’t off the hook yet, and launches into a tale of two broken chandeliers, a love quadrangle, and an enchanted prop sword. 

\--

Dorothea was right. They are all worried about her. Byleth hates that she knows this now, hates that she hadn’t noticed earlier the way Ferdinand looks like she’s insulted his prized warhorse when she begs off his invitations to tea. Linhardt keeps dropping by with passages she “might find of interest,” which are inevitably made even more illegible by his cramped handwriting between the lines. Petra sends her a lovely fur stole and a wicked-looking knife, and Bernadetta gives her a potted plant, which she tries very hard not to kill. (Caspar accidentally crushes the pot when he kicks her door open to invite her to spar with him.) Even Hubert’s eyes follow her through the halls, and he keeps giving her missions that will involve killing rather than talking, which Byleth knows is his way of showing he cares. 

Only Edelgard is not solicitous, too busy keeping the empire running to shower her with gifts. They curl around each other every night, both too exhausted to do much more than a perfunctory fumble between the sheets. Byleth finds it refreshing that at least one person in her life trusts her not to lose her mind without an active war going on, that she has this one thing that won’t crumble to dust as soon as she turns away from it. 

\--

The next morning, when she goes to the marketplace to get more tea, there’s a crowd of people blocking the entrance to the castle chanting her name. She looks up to their window and Edelgard is there, looking down at her, her face unreadable as the stone masks on the beasts she’d commanded. 

Ferdinand and the palace guard whisk her back inside without incident. “Why were you going to the market, anyway?” he fusses. “You have servants for that.”

Byleth tries to explain the simple joy of smelling all the heaped spices, of picking out a gift of a whim, the back-and-forth dance of haggling, which is as close to a duel as she gets these days. Then she remembers that Ferdinand has never had to haggle in his life, and gives it up as a bad job.

\--

Edelgard is asleep when Byleth slips into bed that night, the sheet pulled tight around her shoulders. Her arms are pressed tight to her sides in the way Byleth knows means she’s having a nightmare. Byleth presses a kiss to her shoulder, says Edelgard’s name like a litany until she wakes briefly. She buries her tearstained face in Byleth’s chest. 

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she says, softly. 

“Alright,” Byleth says. She strokes Edelgard’s hair back from her forehead until she falls asleep.

Byleth knows it’s not personal– she has her own nightmares, she knows how they shred your sense of place and time and person until everyone is an enemy. But when Edelgard had woken, her face had gone stony again, like she was back on the balcony. Like it had all those years ago, when she’d stood at the other end of the crypt under Garreg Mach, an axe in her hand and blood in her voice. Like Byleth was an obstacle, an enemy.

\--

In the morning Edelgard dresses without looking at her, her back stiff as Byleth helps her into her stays. “Please don’t leave the castle until we find a way to ensure your safety,” she says. She’s already got her emperor voice on.

“Of course, El,” Byleth says. 

Edelgard’s shoulders soften, acknowledging the hit. She turns and kisses Byleth soft and sweet. “I’m sorry, love,” she says. “I just worry.”

“I know.” Byleth busies herself with lifting Edelgard’s cape onto her shoulders. (The crown, and the elaborate hairdo that supports it, is entirely beyond her.) “I wish–” she falters. “You have too much to worry about already. I don’t wish to be another burden, another problem for you to solve.”

Edelgard takes her hands, her grip bruising, and kisses her fiercely until a servant comes to bring her to the royal briefing. 

“We’ll figure it out,” Byleth says, as she leaves.

Edelgard hesitates in the door. “Of course,” she says, her voice light. “Of course.”

\--

Byleth sneaks out of the castle in commoner’s clothing. The skirt tangles her legs and she keeps forgetting to pick it up when she climbs stairs or steps over puddles, but no one would guess it was her. In the marketplace, the shopkeep next to the tea merchant is selling tiny charms. She asks to see them, and realizes they are amulets of her face against an emblem she doesn’t recognize. 

“The Lady,” the shopkeep says, “for protection, and unveiling hidden things. And one day soon, for freedom from tyranny.” He taps his nose.

Byleth’s stomach feels heavy. She pulls her wimple closer around her face and thanks him for his time. She hurries back to the castle and doesn’t realize until the iron gate slams closed behind her that she forgot to buy tea.

She’s always been a weapon. She just didn’t realize– when you’re a sword, you can be pointed in directions you didn’t intend. At the Empress’s heart, for instance.

\--

The throne room is dark. The light from the open door glints off the golden horns on Edelgard's crown. The throne is massive, but Edelgard's small frame sprawls across it easily. 

She looks up at Byleth, her eyes dark and distant. "I hear the people have another new name for you," she says, her voice crackling across the room. "They call you the Bound Blade."

"Yes." 

"Come here, then," Edelgard says. There is a honed edge to her words, and Byleth has always loved that steel. She goes. 

Edelgard pushes her to her knees, tangles her fingers in Byleth's hair. Her skirts are heavy around Byleth's shoulders, like the choking weight of a Silence spell; she can hardly breathe. 

Byleth bows for her empress and sets to work. Edelgard is still wearing the gauntlets, the metal harsh against her scalp. She breathes through her nose, Edelgard's taste familiar on her tongue. 

The empress does not speak, and Byleth's mouth is otherwise occupied. She thinks perhaps they should– they have scarcely exchanged words since Hubert's meeting. They haven’t talked about any of this– Byleth’s burgeoning cult, Edelgard’s fears, this simmering tension.

She tries to pour everything she would have said into the motion of her tongue on Edelgard's cunt instead. "I’m afraid," she says with her tongue flat against Edelgard's clit, “of becoming something you despise.” “I was only ever your sword hand, when yours were full with axe and ideals," with her hands firm on Edelgard’s thighs as her hips buck. "Point me in a direction and tell me who to kill," as Edelgard tightens and eases around her. “I love you,” as she kisses her through the aftershocks.

The grip in her hair relaxes, and she pushes Edelgard's skirts out of the way to see the empress fade from Edelgard's eyes as she sags back against the throne. 

Like this, she is not Edelgard the Undying, Autokrateira, the Empress of Fódlan and the Western Isles. She is only a woman, well-muscled, small, terribly mortal. Byleth runs her thumb over Edelgard's exposed ankle, oddly touched to find that she has slipped her court shoes off under her imperial robes. 

Edelgard takes a shuddering breath. Byleth stands to kiss her, and finds her eyes wet. She pulls her wife to her and kisses her until her mouth is full of salt. 

She can see, as surely as if Sothis still slept inside her, the years stretching ahead of her. "Hubert is right," Edelgard will say, her voice quiet with the weight of it. Byleth will go where she points, a blade hammered into a monstrance. And day by miserable day, Edelgard will grow to hate the edifice her wife has become for her. 

They both know this. That's the worst part of it. Edelgard has always known the future to itch under her skin like claws, and Byleth feels it draw her like a tide, slow, inexorable, crushing. 

Edelgard puts her gauntleted hand to Byleth's face, the cruel metal cupped so, so gently against her cheek. She slides her clever hand down to Byleth's throat, where the pulse beats rabbit-fast, though Edelgard surely cannot feel it through the gauntlet. 

Edelgard has never accepted the situation given her. And of course she has found a way out of this too. Of course she has. The people will not make a martyr of Byleth, nor of anyone else. Because Edelgard will have already done it for them.

Hubert, Byleth thinks, a little hysterically, is going to be furious he didn't think of this first. 

Edelgard looks at her, tears spilling freely down her cheeks now. Her shoulders shake as she tilts her head in unspoken question. Byleth knows she cannot bear to say the words, to ask this of her. 

She puts her hand to Edelgard's. She smiles up at her, presses her fingers down against Edelgard's cool metal grip, where the cool air flows not-yet-broken under her skin. She nods. 

And Edelgard's iron grip tightens around her throat. She holds her wife so gently, so firmly, you would think it was an embrace. She holds her, she holds her, she _holds_–

In the throne room, the Empress of All Fódlan kneels by the body of her wife, laid there upon the dais like an offering, and sobs, ugly, hiccuping. She reaches her hands, mighty, gauntleted, and tears the imperial crown from her head. With a scream she throws the thing away from her. It lands at the foot of the throne, spinning, its horns glinting dully in the low light. 

Her chest heaves. And then with slow steps she descends from the dais, leaves Byleth slumped there on the cold marble. Her crown scrapes across the floor with a shriek when she bends to pick it up. 

Edelgard is still weeping as she places it on her head. She smooths her skirts, adjusts her blood red gauntlets, steps forward to the future she has promised them both. To work.

**Author's Note:**

> this idea grabbed hold of my brain and would not let me go so I wrote several thousand words in a fugue state. I'm @shipyrds on twitter if you'd like to yell at me. shout-out as always to the discord, i promise i'll write something happy soon.


End file.
